Kickstarter 2014: By the Numbers

In 2014, crowdfunding became more popular than ever before and Kickstarter was heavily involved. They’ve created a brilliant dataset summarising their activity over the year.

Individuals have become more reliant on crowdfunding, as they look to gain the vital investment they need to ‘kickstart’. Kickstarter‘s aim is to help creators, groups and organisations by providing them a space in which they can showcase their potential to millions of ‘investors’.

They have reported that in 2014, 22,252 creative projects were successfully funded on Kickstarter worldwide. Demonstrating the diversity of the platform, nine of the project categories had over 1,000 successful campaigns, with 1,124 coming in the technology category.

Over the course of the year 3.3 million people, from nearly every country on the planet backed a project, pledging more than half a billion US dollars ($1,000 every minute). Of this figure, 261,771 of those were from the UK, pledging a staggering $39m. To demonstrate just how geographically widespread the backers were, Kickstarter created an interactive map which displays the volume of backers and amount pledged from every nation on earth.

Kickstarter’s level of success is especially significant for technology projects, as they received by far the highest level of backing with $125m of the $529m total for the year.

One of the most popular Kickstarter campaigns of the year was from London-based Kano, who set themselves a goal of $100,000 but ended up raising $1,522,160 from 13,387 backers. Kano created a computer ‘that anyone can make’ powered by Raspberry Pi.

Kano’s fundraising venture was the only London-based project of a total of five UK projects which raised over a million US dollars.

Other projects include:

Zano (Pembrokeshire) – an autonomous, intelligent, swarming nano drone, which raised a whopping $2.3m after setting a goal of just $125,000

Elite:Dangerous (Cambridge) – the latest instalment in a long series of epic space games, starting with ‘Elite’, one of the most successful games of the 1980s, raising more than $1.5m